Wow, it looks terrible to be honest. I agree with the analysis. WAY overpriced, especially considering the Samsung alternative. A swing and a miss from OCZ/Toshiba.
Hi JellyRoll, Thank you for your comment, since this is my first post in regards to this article please allow me to identify myself as a member of the OCZ Storage Solutions. Usually by the time a product launches the MSRP already changed. We’re monitoring pricing very closely and will adjust to where the market goes. We believe with this drive's endurance and reliability it's a good option for users looking to upgrade from a HDD. Thank you again for your input.
This drive makes the ARC100 look even more like "the most underrated value drive". The Trion would need to undercut it significantly (and the BX100 and 850EVO).
To be fair, everyone here would expect a certain degree of performance at each price point... This drive drops the ball on performance, so it needs to pick up the slack when it comes to price.
Also... To put this in perspective, this drive is probably as fast/maybe even slower than my OCZ Vertex 2 that I am still using today, which I bought 5-6 years ago...
Here is direct advice for OCZ: this is a very bad SSD, and there's no way to position bad SSDs profitably because the bottom of the market is already crowded with bad SSDs that have to be sold below cost.
Instead, you should make SSDs that are not bad and are positioned appropriately in the marketplace. It's probably possible to make an SSD with a lower cost-to-manufacture that is not garbage and thus people might actually make a willing, informed choice to buy. I know it's not easy to differentiate your drives in a crowded market, but just making awful drives and hoping people buy them without knowing what they are getting is not a good strategy.
Hi LtGoonRush, Thank you for your input. We are a new organization under Toshiba and have made significant changes to everything from the design processes to production and validation. Trion 100 is optimized for value users, the market price will fluctuate and we will adjust. We appreciate your feedback.
It's not a bad SSDs. Its slow, i give you that, but not so slow, that typical user will notice. Still orders of magnitude faster than typical HDDs.
Its just need to be priced lower and it will make sense. And maybe a few firmware tweaks to boost speed a little, where it makes most sense. I'm sure there is something to be done.
Speaking from my perspective, you can't just create a mediocre product and expect to survive in this day and age, unless it has outstanding value for the money. As for storage solutions, SSD price per GB is still high compared to HDD. Most of us are still not be able to afford SSD for the whole system, boot and storage. Furthermore, it's possible for SSD to lose its integrity if it's not being used for long period of time which defeats the whole purpose of data storing. For now I can only hope OCZ and the rest of the underdogs can improve and compete. We, consumers wouldn't want one company completely dominates the market. So, good luck OCZ.
Hi sonny73n, Thank you for your comment. You are right there is still a price gap between SSD and HDD. With the introduction of Trion 100 and OCZ adjusting prices quickly with the market trend we hope to narrow that price gap and making this SSD affordable for the mass market. Thank you again for your feedback and words of encouragement.
I have an 840 EVO from not too long ago in my laptop and I'm so ready to send it to the trash. There's an article here about its problems which Samsung have been incapable of fixing with new firmware updates that you should take a look on. Beside, I consider it's cheating when Samsung use my system RAM as cache for their SSD. My next SSD definitely won't be Samsung's.
I've heard of a "one trick pony" before. I've never seen a "one link troll" before now. The linked article doesn't even involve Samsung SSD's. Not only are you a troll, you're an ignorant troll.
Toshiba's silence on the drive probably makes enthusiasts nervous about this drive, if they weren't already nervous considering OCZ's heritage... This might be a tough sell indeed.
To be honest SSDs like these should be marketed cheap and largely aimed at SATA I/II kit owners. A lot of kit out there is still only SATA II and to be honest the cheapest SSD out there will push 260MBps all day long and still feel light speed fast compared to the 5400rpm 65MBps HDD it replaced. No point bothering trying to say they compete for SATA III owners. Hence why I buy a lot of the Kingston V300 SSDs. Most here wouldnt touch them but they are reliable, the cheapest and will push a SATA II laptop or PC to its max.
It makes sense, since OCZ has far more SSD experience than Toshiba; that's why Toshiba bought them. Unfortunately it looks like OCZ's "validation" procedures haven't changed much from the days of the Vertex 2 debacle.
That isn't neccessarily true. Barefoot 3 firmware has been excellent from the beginning. Performance is good and reliability in my experience has been excellent.
As far as OCZ drives go (this Toshiba drive included) Barefoot 3 drives are the only models to consider. We all know about OCZ's Sandforce firmware reliability and the Indilinx Everest has worse performance than the Marvell-based equivalent.
I still find it hard to consider drives other than Crucial MX100's and even older M500's because they are so reliable and inexpensive.
I just don't trust Samsung TLC drives, though, although quite hypocritically I am running the 850 EVO M.2 (500GB) in my laptop right now, which replaced a Crucial M550 (256GB) because Crucial's only M.2 single-sided drives in 512GB capacity are the MX200 which leaves a lot to be desired performance and power-wise, compared to the 850 EVO.
I just hope performance doesn't fall like a rock like the 840 EVO's did.
hasn't it been long enough now to discern whether or not the 850 TLC suffers the same problems as the 840's? Was really hoping for a definitive follow up article by now. Or at least a community consensus. ( though I suppose it is rather cowardly to ask " did u guys blow yer money" as a research strategy :) )
I wonder when toshiba bought them out, if they were aware of the stigma of how awful the ocz line/brand of ssds were, and most people 'in the know' avoided them.
Because toshiba drives are dog slow. They have lost a lot of OEMs because of their performance. Look at the original macbook's that randomly gave customers toshiba or Samsung drives...take a guess which ones were substantially better? OCZ has indilinx which was easily worth what toshiba paid.
You know what is REALLY amazing? This has better endurance than the 2TB 850 Pro, which is only .04 DWPD. Part of that is due to its ten-year warranty, BUT if you normalize the warranty periods the 850 PRO (and its 2bit MLC 3D V-NAND) is still not competitive with the 2D planar TLC on the OCZ. Shocking indeed.
Don't make the error of confabulating "endurance", which is really no more than a theoretical number, with reliability. Samsung g's drives have, for the most part, proved to be reliable whereas OCz's have not.
In fact, a problem here is that Toshiba has had their own reliability problems.
These tests don't tell us anything about that, as Anandtech has been enamoured with OCZ going way back, despite all of their problems. I'm disappointed they're even bothering to talk about OCZ until their reliability in the field is proven after the purchase. Otherwise, it's just more wasted time and energy.
Samsung drives have proven to be reliable, in that they don't fail, but they have also proven to have what is being covered up as a technological manufacturing defect dating back to the TLC-based 840 EVO that literally destroys the performance of the drive. The chill factor is Samsung A) initially ignored the issue, GM-style B) failed to fix the issue twice over 9 months of firmware updates and C) is now back to ignoring the issue, GM-style.
At least OCZ published routine firmware updates, honored their warranties, and provided competitive prices.
I think the big issue with the 850Pro is that the warranty and rating on the drive is more about targeting a specific market rather than the actual performance of the V-NAND. The drive should be capable of much higher endurance. MLC V-NAND should have a much much higher endurance than TLC as it is trying to store fewer bits per cell and is a step back in lithography size making the cells bigger. Maybe Samsung is using some really low quality V-NAND in the 850 pro but I think it is really about "targeting" the drive at the consumer market rather than the data center.
Published endurance ratings != actual endurance!!!
Published endurance ratings are only used for two reasons: 1) To keep write heavy enterprize users away 2) For warranty purposes (A published endurance rating gives a hard cutoff for the end of warranty period, besides the time period running out)
ACTUAL endurance of the NAND is usually WAY higher, especially with the Samsung 850 series drives.
It looks like these drives have had their endurance validated according to the JEDEC JESD219A client workload specification, which means it's actually a meaningful value rather than one arbitrarily set by the manufacturer to keep heavy users away.
I'm really really really curious to some data retention measurements. I would appreciate it greatly if AT would throw some MLC and TLC SSD's in the vault for half a year and then report back with an awesome review!
Samsung's 850 line looks poised to have as much staying power as the 830s (luckily I skipped the buggy 840 EVO since I wasn't looking for more capacity at the time)... Looking forward to some BF or Amazon's 20th deals on that 1TB 850 EVO! (tho I probably should've just bought it when it hit $340 not long ago) Is Samsung releasing a new series early next year or are they all about PCI-E/M2 moving forward?
2.5" SSDs aren't going away anytime soon, so I'm sure we'll see Samsung 860 series SSDs in the future. How soon is the question, because it seems there's not much that can be done to speed up drives without having them bottlenecked by SATA3 and AHCI.
The advances for the 860 series are likely to focus on density rather than performance upgrades. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement in random IO performance.
"It's just silly to take up to 50% hit in performance and only offer a few dollar savings because any educated buyer will gladly pay the extra few dollars for a substantially better drive."
Exactly, and enthusiasts are usually the ones recommending products to other more casual users/buyers.
Doesn't matter if it comes with gold-plating and platinum trim. It's still an OCZ, and they're the worst company in the SSD marketplace. They went broke for a reason, should've just let the company die peacefully. Toshiba is a good company, I hope they don't get dragged down to OCZ's level.
Others catch up with V-NAND? Who the heck cares what they brand the NAND... 3D nand is a joke. There is no such thing as NAND that exists in the 2nd dimension lol. Plus, with Samsung you constantly have to deal with firmware update failures and crippled performance after 6 months. OCZ isn't great but they are disconnected from reality.
Except V-NAND isn't just branding. There are multiple layers of NAND stacked on top of each other for much higher density. And as far as I'm aware, the only performance degradation issues have been with the 840 and 840 EVO series. Neither uses V-NAND, they're conventional TLC.
In the past year I've deployed 30 SSD's at the company I work at. We use them for crunching cloud scanner data, so we're regularly filling then clearing entire 500gb drives and hitting them pretty hard while working with the datasets. 20 of those drives are Samsung 850 Evo's, they've all been running fine for about a year now. 4 of them are Crucial M550's, had one of them fail within a week but the RMA replacement drive is going well and all 4 are trucking along fine 6 months later.
The other 6 were OCZ Arc 100's. All 6 failed within two months. RMA'd them all, assumed a bad batch. Serials on the replacement drives were two months newer, two of the 6 failed again within a couple of weeks. I've relegated the rest of the OCZ drives to unimportant tasks, it's just not worth the risk. I had high hopes after the Toshiba acquisition but it would take something extraordinary from me to trust an OCZ product again.
Then Samsung's V-NAND is actually working and no company could touch or get near that technology including Intel/Micron. Samsung is on fire, as I am also impressed with their 14nm SoC in the S6.
So sad we can't get an update to the Intel 730 (735?) with 960GB size. Specifically NOT pci-e so a wider set of systems can use them. Clearly there are memory chips to do such a thing as shown here today...
Certainly a fail for OCZ/Toshiba. You'd think they would have "went back to the drawing board" with this instead of "releasing to the market". Ugh.
But, OCZ does have some very good drives out there. Vector 150/180, Vertex 460/A, Radeon R7 drives are all very good (Vector with some impeccable services times and very fast at regular-people workloads), but in the SSD market competition is pretty stiff. If you can get one of the above OCZ drives at a good/sale price they can be excellent drives for the money. The ARC 100 was somewhat disappointing but not terrible so I don't see them as worth buying unless you're getting them at a really good price. The Trion though, not much else to say but fail.
Looks very much like this is a Phison-controlled drive and though Phison isn't bad it seems to require very specific NAND/configuration to actually shine. Either the TLC handling of the S10 is just poor or Toshiba's TLC isn't that great, or both/combination.
The first manufacturer who can get a 128/256 GB ssd to be (within a few dollars of) the same price as a 5400rpm 500GB HDD -- Will win at life. Full stop. End of argument. All those rubbish midrange laptops that have everything a person needs except fast storage.... All they need is fast storage and they would be very capable and would catapult any OEM into a leading position in that demographic. If they can get this ssd down to those prices for OEM (I realise this is retail) then they have a winner. As an enthusiast drive... Massive fail.
-Marketing from a dead brand with a bad reputation for reliability... Check!
-Design from a stubborn, tight lipped old school Japanese megacorp who refuses to disclose technical details... Check!
-Controller sourced from a bottom-feeding Taiwanese manufacturer accustomed to designing barely functional solutions at minimal cost for OEMs... Check!
Clearly this drive wasn't designed for ultimate performance, but as I replace more and more of my HDDs with SSDs I begin to worry more about the reliability and endurance of the storage, than the performance:
How sure can I be, that after five years of mixed usage, some intensive I/O, some stuff (e.g. baby pictures) only ever written once, the SSD perhaps lying around for two years in a safe or another having suffered through years in a quiet but rather warm passive PC every bit of data will come off exactly as it was written? Add automobile scenarios or others with lots of electronic noise to make things harder.
After all storage isn't just about pounding these things with random bits and see how long they last, it's about delivering on a promise to return everything as it was written a millisecond or years ago.
Anandtech can't really test that, even if they do an incredible job at testing what can be tested within such a short time and a limited budget.
But perhaps it's exactly in that area, the reliability under almost all circumstances, where Toshiba shines and others less so?
So far I never really worried, because my SSDs mostly contained cache data which was quickly forwarded to a RAID of trusted rotating rusties or had a backup copy on them: The overall risks and exposure times were low and seemed well managed with the tests done.
But as the rusties finally spin down and SSDs become the prime medium for all my data, perspective and requirements change.
For example the data decay discussion, where retention time depends and varies widely with write temperature and storage temperature.
If you retire an older SSD (as you might with HDDs) at 80% overwrite capacity used to become a backup device, write data with the drive barely warming beyond room temperature and then put it away in the cellar, dry and above freezing, and then plug it in a year or two later: Will you still get your data back?
Since the drive doesn't have a clock: How does it even know that it should start checking for and compensating bit rot?
What does that mean for your backup strategy: Should you fully rewrite the data every couple of months? Should pre-warm the drive before rewriting to ensure optimal retention?
I can't believe Toshiba was simply unable to design a product which was fast and economic. I'd like to believe that perhaps we are missing their design goal.
I wouldnt touch ocz if they gave it to me for free. such garbage and bad ethics as a company. didnt they file for bankruptcy? we dont need crap companies that make drives where people store important data on them. after selling the core series years back with the jmicron chips and knowing they were defective I have no respect for them. I tell anyone that asks about components NEVER to buy OCZ.
I always wondered why no other company bid on the OCZ bankruptcy assets. Toshiba was the only bidder. Now we learn............
"Toshiba president Hisao Tanaka and his predecessor Norio Sasaki resigned on Tuesday over a $1.2 billion accounting scandal blamed on management's overzealous pursuit of profits"
"It has been revealed that there has been inappropriate accounting going on for a long time, and we deeply apologise for causing this serious trouble for shareholders and other stakeholders," said a company statement.
I thought Toshiba acquired OCZ for the expertise. Instead, the only thing they seem to be using is the brand label - a brand connoting unreliability and deceitfulness. High-fives upper management!
Thanks for another great review Kristian. It is always good to see the full spectrum of what exists in the SSD space, and let the results do the talking.
I'm still not seeing major advantages over the Crucial MX100 512GB in many cases when it comes to high capacity, great performance, and good value.
I expect more from OCZ when I see that name. My OCZ DDR memory sticks are a reminder of that bygone era.
Hi folks. Now that the price of this drive has dropped to $279 its looking more attractive as a budget drive. Do we think that there is a possibility that firmware updates would improve its performance over time? Thanks.
New firmware (11.2) was just released which addresses the high latency issues on heavy loads, which should improve performance (and possibly power consumption as well) in the "The Destroyer" section of these tests where it performed particularly badly.
The firmware version format seen on these drives is pretty obviously a Phison S10 controller, so hopefully OCZ can apply their expertise at low latency firmware design from the Barefoot-based products to this architecture and hopefully Phison-based products in general. Barefoot-based drives unfortunately can't really be recommend in general for mobile use because of their high power consumption, so this teaming of OCZ and Phison has some potential (like Intel and Sandforce in their SSD products) for improving the market in general.
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JellyRoll - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Wow, it looks terrible to be honest. I agree with the analysis. WAY overpriced, especially considering the Samsung alternative. A swing and a miss from OCZ/Toshiba.ocz_tuff_bunny - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Hi JellyRoll,Thank you for your comment, since this is my first post in regards to this article please allow me to identify myself as a member of the OCZ Storage Solutions. Usually by the time a product launches the MSRP already changed. We’re monitoring pricing very closely and will adjust to where the market goes. We believe with this drive's endurance and reliability it's a good option for users looking to upgrade from a HDD. Thank you again for your input.
MrSpadge - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
This drive makes the ARC100 look even more like "the most underrated value drive". The Trion would need to undercut it significantly (and the BX100 and 850EVO).StevoLincolnite - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
To be fair, everyone here would expect a certain degree of performance at each price point... This drive drops the ball on performance, so it needs to pick up the slack when it comes to price.Also... To put this in perspective, this drive is probably as fast/maybe even slower than my OCZ Vertex 2 that I am still using today, which I bought 5-6 years ago...
LtGoonRush - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Here is direct advice for OCZ: this is a very bad SSD, and there's no way to position bad SSDs profitably because the bottom of the market is already crowded with bad SSDs that have to be sold below cost.Instead, you should make SSDs that are not bad and are positioned appropriately in the marketplace. It's probably possible to make an SSD with a lower cost-to-manufacture that is not garbage and thus people might actually make a willing, informed choice to buy. I know it's not easy to differentiate your drives in a crowded market, but just making awful drives and hoping people buy them without knowing what they are getting is not a good strategy.
NvidiaWins - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Samsung is one of those bottom feeding SSD vendors......Read this- http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
Questor - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
This article barely mentions Samsung and not in a negative manner. How is it that you feel your comment and the link are relevant to this discussion?ocz_tuff_bunny - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Hi LtGoonRush,Thank you for your input. We are a new organization under Toshiba and have made significant changes to everything from the design processes to production and validation. Trion 100 is optimized for value users, the market price will fluctuate and we will adjust. We appreciate your feedback.
hojnikb - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
It's not a bad SSDs. Its slow, i give you that, but not so slow, that typical user will notice. Still orders of magnitude faster than typical HDDs.Its just need to be priced lower and it will make sense. And maybe a few firmware tweaks to boost speed a little, where it makes most sense. I'm sure there is something to be done.
sonny73n - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Hi ocz_tuff_bunny,Speaking from my perspective, you can't just create a mediocre product and expect to survive in this day and age, unless it has outstanding value for the money. As for storage solutions, SSD price per GB is still high compared to HDD. Most of us are still not be able to afford SSD for the whole system, boot and storage. Furthermore, it's possible for SSD to lose its integrity if it's not being used for long period of time which defeats the whole purpose of data storing.
For now I can only hope OCZ and the rest of the underdogs can improve and compete. We, consumers wouldn't want one company completely dominates the market. So, good luck OCZ.
ocz_tuff_bunny - Friday, July 17, 2015 - link
Hi sonny73n,Thank you for your comment. You are right there is still a price gap between SSD and HDD. With the introduction of Trion 100 and OCZ adjusting prices quickly with the market trend we hope to narrow that price gap and making this SSD affordable for the mass market. Thank you again for your feedback and words of encouragement.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
In the interest of transparency, one comment has been removed for profanity and racism.As a reminder to all readers, racism and profanity are not welcome nor tolerated in the AnandTech comments.
sonny73n - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
"considering the Samsung alternative" Really?I have an 840 EVO from not too long ago in my laptop and I'm so ready to send it to the trash. There's an article here about its problems which Samsung have been incapable of fixing with new firmware updates that you should take a look on. Beside, I consider it's cheating when Samsung use my system RAM as cache for their SSD. My next SSD definitely won't be Samsung's.
NvidiaWins - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Samsung is terrible SSD manufactuer, in fact Intel was the only SSD that passed Torture Testinghttp://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...
ggathagan - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
I've heard of a "one trick pony" before.I've never seen a "one link troll" before now.
The linked article doesn't even involve Samsung SSD's.
Not only are you a troll, you're an ignorant troll.
shadowjk - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Toshiba's silence on the drive probably makes enthusiasts nervous about this drive, if they weren't already nervous considering OCZ's heritage... This might be a tough sell indeed.jabber - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
To be honest SSDs like these should be marketed cheap and largely aimed at SATA I/II kit owners. A lot of kit out there is still only SATA II and to be honest the cheapest SSD out there will push 260MBps all day long and still feel light speed fast compared to the 5400rpm 65MBps HDD it replaced. No point bothering trying to say they compete for SATA III owners. Hence why I buy a lot of the Kingston V300 SSDs. Most here wouldnt touch them but they are reliable, the cheapest and will push a SATA II laptop or PC to its max.romrunning - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
"OCZ wasn't involved in the development of the Trion 100, but it did help Toshiba to validate the drive. "With OCZ's past history, I found that statement to be quite humorous! :)
TheWrongChristian - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Yeah. I was expecting the relationship to work the other way round.The_Assimilator - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
It makes sense, since OCZ has far more SSD experience than Toshiba; that's why Toshiba bought them. Unfortunately it looks like OCZ's "validation" procedures haven't changed much from the days of the Vertex 2 debacle.Samus - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
That isn't neccessarily true. Barefoot 3 firmware has been excellent from the beginning. Performance is good and reliability in my experience has been excellent.As far as OCZ drives go (this Toshiba drive included) Barefoot 3 drives are the only models to consider. We all know about OCZ's Sandforce firmware reliability and the Indilinx Everest has worse performance than the Marvell-based equivalent.
I still find it hard to consider drives other than Crucial MX100's and even older M500's because they are so reliable and inexpensive.
I just don't trust Samsung TLC drives, though, although quite hypocritically I am running the 850 EVO M.2 (500GB) in my laptop right now, which replaced a Crucial M550 (256GB) because Crucial's only M.2 single-sided drives in 512GB capacity are the MX200 which leaves a lot to be desired performance and power-wise, compared to the 850 EVO.
I just hope performance doesn't fall like a rock like the 840 EVO's did.
theuglyman0war - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
hasn't it been long enough now to discern whether or not the 850 TLC suffers the same problems as the 840's? Was really hoping for a definitive follow up article by now. Or at least a community consensus. ( though I suppose it is rather cowardly to ask " did u guys blow yer money" as a research strategy :) )IlllI - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
I wonder when toshiba bought them out, if they were aware of the stigma of how awful the ocz line/brand of ssds were, and most people 'in the know' avoided them.Gigaplex - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
The stigma of OCZ isn't the only confusing part. Toshiba built their own in house SSD, why did they need OCZ in the first place?Samus - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Because toshiba drives are dog slow. They have lost a lot of OEMs because of their performance. Look at the original macbook's that randomly gave customers toshiba or Samsung drives...take a guess which ones were substantially better? OCZ has indilinx which was easily worth what toshiba paid.Gigaplex - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
And yet Toshiba opted to rebrand a Toshiba drive as OCZ, rather than the other way around.JellyRoll - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
You know what is REALLY amazing? This has better endurance than the 2TB 850 Pro, which is only .04 DWPD. Part of that is due to its ten-year warranty, BUT if you normalize the warranty periods the 850 PRO (and its 2bit MLC 3D V-NAND) is still not competitive with the 2D planar TLC on the OCZ. Shocking indeed.melgross - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Don't make the error of confabulating "endurance", which is really no more than a theoretical number, with reliability. Samsung g's drives have, for the most part, proved to be reliable whereas OCz's have not.In fact, a problem here is that Toshiba has had their own reliability problems.
These tests don't tell us anything about that, as Anandtech has been enamoured with OCZ going way back, despite all of their problems. I'm disappointed they're even bothering to talk about OCZ until their reliability in the field is proven after the purchase. Otherwise, it's just more wasted time and energy.
Samus - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Samsung drives have proven to be reliable, in that they don't fail, but they have also proven to have what is being covered up as a technological manufacturing defect dating back to the TLC-based 840 EVO that literally destroys the performance of the drive. The chill factor is Samsung A) initially ignored the issue, GM-style B) failed to fix the issue twice over 9 months of firmware updates and C) is now back to ignoring the issue, GM-style.At least OCZ published routine firmware updates, honored their warranties, and provided competitive prices.
kpb321 - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
I think the big issue with the 850Pro is that the warranty and rating on the drive is more about targeting a specific market rather than the actual performance of the V-NAND. The drive should be capable of much higher endurance. MLC V-NAND should have a much much higher endurance than TLC as it is trying to store fewer bits per cell and is a step back in lithography size making the cells bigger. Maybe Samsung is using some really low quality V-NAND in the 850 pro but I think it is really about "targeting" the drive at the consumer market rather than the data center.extide - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Published endurance ratings != actual endurance!!!Published endurance ratings are only used for two reasons:
1) To keep write heavy enterprize users away
2) For warranty purposes (A published endurance rating gives a hard cutoff for the end of warranty period, besides the time period running out)
ACTUAL endurance of the NAND is usually WAY higher, especially with the Samsung 850 series drives.
Solid State Brain - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
It looks like these drives have had their endurance validated according to the JEDEC JESD219A client workload specification, which means it's actually a meaningful value rather than one arbitrarily set by the manufacturer to keep heavy users away.jann5s - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
I'm really really really curious to some data retention measurements. I would appreciate it greatly if AT would throw some MLC and TLC SSD's in the vault for half a year and then report back with an awesome review!Ken_g6 - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Looks like the Trion is a drive to bypass. Maybe they'd do better with a drive called the "Succeedon".camelNotation - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
LOL nice oneImpulses - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Samsung's 850 line looks poised to have as much staying power as the 830s (luckily I skipped the buggy 840 EVO since I wasn't looking for more capacity at the time)... Looking forward to some BF or Amazon's 20th deals on that 1TB 850 EVO! (tho I probably should've just bought it when it hit $340 not long ago) Is Samsung releasing a new series early next year or are they all about PCI-E/M2 moving forward?The_Assimilator - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
2.5" SSDs aren't going away anytime soon, so I'm sure we'll see Samsung 860 series SSDs in the future. How soon is the question, because it seems there's not much that can be done to speed up drives without having them bottlenecked by SATA3 and AHCI.Gigaplex - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
The advances for the 860 series are likely to focus on density rather than performance upgrades. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement in random IO performance.Byte - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Samsung already announced 2TB 850 Evo and Pros, the prices look pretty good also. Its gonna be hard to top the 850 series!http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2015/07/07/s...
eek2121 - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
You guys act like the 840 EVO was the worst drive in the world. I've had 0 problems with mine in the year that i've owned it and couldn't be happier.ncsaephanh - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
"It's just silly to take up to 50% hit in performance and only offer a few dollar savings because any educated buyer will gladly pay the extra few dollars for a substantially better drive."Exactly, and enthusiasts are usually the ones recommending products to other more casual users/buyers.
LB-ID - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Doesn't matter if it comes with gold-plating and platinum trim. It's still an OCZ, and they're the worst company in the SSD marketplace. They went broke for a reason, should've just let the company die peacefully. Toshiba is a good company, I hope they don't get dragged down to OCZ's level.Gigaplex - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
It's not an OCZ, it's a Toshiba with OCZ branding.serndipity - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Three years later and this is what's being offered!!!!!From the OCZ earning conference call om May 1, 2012.
"And further it’s our intent to continue to bring low cost technologies to market such as our TLC-based products, enabling this trend."
The recent move into 1x nm lithography has been problematic for both MLC and TLC.
Until others catch up with Samsung's V-NAND, it's only SSD I'm putting into builds now.
ssdpro - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
Others catch up with V-NAND? Who the heck cares what they brand the NAND... 3D nand is a joke. There is no such thing as NAND that exists in the 2nd dimension lol. Plus, with Samsung you constantly have to deal with firmware update failures and crippled performance after 6 months. OCZ isn't great but they are disconnected from reality.Gigaplex - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Except V-NAND isn't just branding. There are multiple layers of NAND stacked on top of each other for much higher density. And as far as I'm aware, the only performance degradation issues have been with the 840 and 840 EVO series. Neither uses V-NAND, they're conventional TLC.masterpine - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
In the past year I've deployed 30 SSD's at the company I work at. We use them for crunching cloud scanner data, so we're regularly filling then clearing entire 500gb drives and hitting them pretty hard while working with the datasets. 20 of those drives are Samsung 850 Evo's, they've all been running fine for about a year now. 4 of them are Crucial M550's, had one of them fail within a week but the RMA replacement drive is going well and all 4 are trucking along fine 6 months later.The other 6 were OCZ Arc 100's. All 6 failed within two months. RMA'd them all, assumed a bad batch. Serials on the replacement drives were two months newer, two of the 6 failed again within a couple of weeks. I've relegated the rest of the OCZ drives to unimportant tasks, it's just not worth the risk. I had high hopes after the Toshiba acquisition but it would take something extraordinary from me to trust an OCZ product again.
zodiacfml - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
Then Samsung's V-NAND is actually working and no company could touch or get near that technology including Intel/Micron. Samsung is on fire, as I am also impressed with their 14nm SoC in the S6.StrangerGuy - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
OCZ is such a toxic brand I wonder why Toshiba is daft enough to still keep it.FXi - Thursday, July 9, 2015 - link
So sad we can't get an update to the Intel 730 (735?) with 960GB size. Specifically NOT pci-e so a wider set of systems can use them. Clearly there are memory chips to do such a thing as shown here today...valnar - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
19nm process *and* TLC *and* a brand new ECC method? No thanks. Sounds too risky.NvidiaWins - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link
There's a reason OCZ went bankrupt....their SSD's are HORRIBLE!hojnikb - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
Good thing this is OCZ only by name.Read the d*** article.
ES_Revenge - Sunday, July 12, 2015 - link
Certainly a fail for OCZ/Toshiba. You'd think they would have "went back to the drawing board" with this instead of "releasing to the market". Ugh.But, OCZ does have some very good drives out there. Vector 150/180, Vertex 460/A, Radeon R7 drives are all very good (Vector with some impeccable services times and very fast at regular-people workloads), but in the SSD market competition is pretty stiff. If you can get one of the above OCZ drives at a good/sale price they can be excellent drives for the money. The ARC 100 was somewhat disappointing but not terrible so I don't see them as worth buying unless you're getting them at a really good price. The Trion though, not much else to say but fail.
Looks very much like this is a Phison-controlled drive and though Phison isn't bad it seems to require very specific NAND/configuration to actually shine. Either the TLC handling of the S10 is just poor or Toshiba's TLC isn't that great, or both/combination.
doggface - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
The first manufacturer who can get a 128/256 GB ssd to be (within a few dollars of) the same price as a 5400rpm 500GB HDD -- Will win at life. Full stop. End of argument. All those rubbish midrange laptops that have everything a person needs except fast storage.... All they need is fast storage and they would be very capable and would catapult any OEM into a leading position in that demographic. If they can get this ssd down to those prices for OEM (I realise this is retail) then they have a winner. As an enthusiast drive... Massive fail.doggface - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
Seriously, This is the perfect midrange laptop.13.3" display IPS
i5 or i3 (AMD equiv) or top cherrytrail.
4gb ram expandable.
128GB ssd
WiFi-n 5ghz.
Usb3/HDMI, camera etc
A decent keyboard
Clean looks.
If you can do that for $5-600 USD.
Millions of sales.
(U can do a better version with a FHD screen, faster WiFi/cpu/dGPU, bigger capacity SSD.)
Pessimism - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
-Marketing from a dead brand with a bad reputation for reliability... Check!-Design from a stubborn, tight lipped old school Japanese megacorp who refuses to disclose technical details... Check!
-Controller sourced from a bottom-feeding Taiwanese manufacturer accustomed to designing barely functional solutions at minimal cost for OEMs... Check!
Recipe for a winner here!
LazloPanaflex - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
LOL, well said!abufrejoval - Monday, July 13, 2015 - link
Clearly this drive wasn't designed for ultimate performance, but as I replace more and more of my HDDs with SSDs I begin to worry more about the reliability and endurance of the storage, than the performance:How sure can I be, that after five years of mixed usage, some intensive I/O, some stuff (e.g. baby pictures) only ever written once, the SSD perhaps lying around for two years in a safe or another having suffered through years in a quiet but rather warm passive PC every bit of data will come off exactly as it was written? Add automobile scenarios or others with lots of electronic noise to make things harder.
After all storage isn't just about pounding these things with random bits and see how long they last, it's about delivering on a promise to return everything as it was written a millisecond or years ago.
Anandtech can't really test that, even if they do an incredible job at testing what can be tested within such a short time and a limited budget.
But perhaps it's exactly in that area, the reliability under almost all circumstances, where Toshiba shines and others less so?
So far I never really worried, because my SSDs mostly contained cache data which was quickly forwarded to a RAID of trusted rotating rusties or had a backup copy on them: The overall risks and exposure times were low and seemed well managed with the tests done.
But as the rusties finally spin down and SSDs become the prime medium for all my data, perspective and requirements change.
For example the data decay discussion, where retention time depends and varies widely with write temperature and storage temperature.
If you retire an older SSD (as you might with HDDs) at 80% overwrite capacity used to become a backup device, write data with the drive barely warming beyond room temperature and then put it away in the cellar, dry and above freezing, and then plug it in a year or two later: Will you still get your data back?
Since the drive doesn't have a clock: How does it even know that it should start checking for and compensating bit rot?
What does that mean for your backup strategy: Should you fully rewrite the data every couple of months? Should pre-warm the drive before rewriting to ensure optimal retention?
I can't believe Toshiba was simply unable to design a product which was fast and economic. I'd like to believe that perhaps we are missing their design goal.
Easy to do, when they are keeping so quiet :-)
rocketman122 - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
I wouldnt touch ocz if they gave it to me for free. such garbage and bad ethics as a company. didnt they file for bankruptcy? we dont need crap companies that make drives where people store important data on them. after selling the core series years back with the jmicron chips and knowing they were defective I have no respect for them. I tell anyone that asks about components NEVER to buy OCZ.harrynsally - Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - link
I always wondered why no other company bid on the OCZ bankruptcy assets. Toshiba was the only bidder. Now we learn............"Toshiba president Hisao Tanaka and his predecessor Norio Sasaki resigned on Tuesday over a $1.2 billion accounting scandal blamed on management's overzealous pursuit of profits"
"It has been revealed that there has been inappropriate accounting going on for a long time, and we deeply apologise for causing this serious trouble for shareholders and other stakeholders," said a company statement.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/toshiba-p...
yefi - Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - link
I thought Toshiba acquired OCZ for the expertise. Instead, the only thing they seem to be using is the brand label - a brand connoting unreliability and deceitfulness. High-fives upper management!creed3020 - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link
Thanks for another great review Kristian. It is always good to see the full spectrum of what exists in the SSD space, and let the results do the talking.I'm still not seeing major advantages over the Crucial MX100 512GB in many cases when it comes to high capacity, great performance, and good value.
I expect more from OCZ when I see that name. My OCZ DDR memory sticks are a reminder of that bygone era.
deadlockedworld - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link
Hi folks. Now that the price of this drive has dropped to $279 its looking more attractive as a budget drive. Do we think that there is a possibility that firmware updates would improve its performance over time? Thanks.cbjwthwm - Friday, September 25, 2015 - link
New firmware (11.2) was just released which addresses the high latency issues on heavy loads, which should improve performance (and possibly power consumption as well) in the "The Destroyer" section of these tests where it performed particularly badly.The firmware version format seen on these drives is pretty obviously a Phison S10 controller, so hopefully OCZ can apply their expertise at low latency firmware design from the Barefoot-based products to this architecture and hopefully Phison-based products in general. Barefoot-based drives unfortunately can't really be recommend in general for mobile use because of their high power consumption, so this teaming of OCZ and Phison has some potential (like Intel and Sandforce in their SSD products) for improving the market in general.